It’s FOSDEM time! I have fond memories of the Microkernel and Component-based OS devroom in particular. It’s a fun meetup of extremely skilled low-level software engineers. This year I cannot attend, so it’s a good time to ramble reflect on it.

Some Background

The community around this devroom has one epicenter in Dresden, where many of us met at the Operating Systems Group at the university. Dresden has a lively systems community, and microkernel enthusiasts are a big part of it. For a large part of my professional life, I was working on microkernel-based systems, too.

Microkernel-based systems are appealing. They result naturally, if you take the idea of Least Privilege to its logical end. They also arise naturally, if you architect an operating system in a rigorously modular fashion.

On paper systems based on microkernels promise clean architecture and extremely secure systems due to a tiny Trusted Computing Base. In reality, despite the conceptual advantages, the microkernel-based systems struggle to achieve traction outside of niches.

The Problem

Some years ago, I sat in a bar with a friend from the microkernel community. We talked a long time about the issues in the community. Despite the common goal of a component-based and secure systems in the community, the point he made was that the inability to work together is self-limiting for each project. Instead of everyone collaborating towards the common goal, each company is reinventing the wheel. Developers are excited to implement a new IPC path that shaves five cycles off compared to the other microkernel’s IPC path or boast about their small TCB, even though this rarely works towards what users would actually need.

This conversation stuck in my head, and I had some years to reflect on it. There are a couple of causes at the core of this problem. The main cause, in my opinion, is that the personality that is required to bootstrap a project is not the best personality to make that project grow.

Starting vs. Growing a Project

Starting a new operating system project requires strong opinions. You want your system to have certain properties. You are not willing to compromise because if you are in the compromising mindset, you could have just used Linux. Linux is everything to everyone, so you could have squinted your eyes to build your ideas on top of it. Instead, you chose to start over because your ideas were so important to you that you were not willing to compromise.

In this bootstrapping phase, you are typically alone or work with few disciples that intimately share your vision. You freely implement things your way. If you need a custom build system to fine-tune your build flow, why not write one as well!

At some point, you reach a state where it’s challenging to make meaningful progress without external contributions to work on larger use cases and iron out the kinks of a still-niche project. You need to grow a community.

To grow a community, you need an entirely different skill set. The lone hacker with a clear vision in their mind is not equipped to do this. Instead of writing beautifully crafted code yourself, you need to be the inspiring leader that rallies people to your cause and establishes structures that will outlast yourself. New developers will come with new ideas and different ways of working. Some of your initial idiosyncratic choices have to give way, while the overall vision remains and evolves.

The person who spent hours implementing their own build system now has to contend with people who say there is a better tool to do the job. And better here usually means much better for them, but worse for you because the old system was carefully polished for your own use case.

So now it’s time to compromise. Do you insist on having this special build system, or do you switch to something other people are familiar with? If you keep insisting on your idiosyncrasies that are not core to the mission of the project, you risk alienating contributors.

To summarize: The skills that you need to start a radical new project are the skills that will not help you in growing a community.

My Wishes

My wishes for the community are to find a way to collaborate instead of starting all over again and again. We need to attrach users. We need to find the “killer app”, where these kinds of systems are obviously better than Linux. And this niche cannot be just pleasing the BSI in certifications.

Systems must be trivial to use and contribute to. We need to embrace open source and open decision processes. No CLAs! Make it trivial to use and to contribute.

We must work together!